The XSLT renderer is a renderer that takes any output from the default renderer (i.e. after processing using flavors), and applies an XSLT, using the result. If you have handy XSLTs that start with XML vocabularies such as Atom or XHTML, you can create such output just as you currently do in PyBlosxom, by appliying your flavor of choice. You can then use the XSLTs you have to produce additional types of output quite easily.
I used this to add an RSS 1.0 feed here on Copia. It starts with the Atom flavor, and uses Antonio Cavedoni's XSLT to translate the atom to RSS 1.0. Taking this approach in general made thinsg a lot easier for me. I went from nothing to RSS 1.0 feed in about two hours of hacking, which included a lot of learning about the plug-in API. Based on the hassles that other PyBlosxom feed projects seemed to be working through, I think the detour through XSLT was quite valuable. It made it easier to lean on the shoulders of others outside the PyBlosxom community.
Anyway some other sample uses:
- A very simple "plain text" feed. Start with the Atom flavor and then use a tiny (5 lines or so) XSLT to strip all tags
- An alternative, image-free view. Start with a flavor that generates XHTML, then apply a tiny (5 lines or so) XSLT to strip all images
There is one configuration option for this plug-in-- xslt_trigger_suffix. See the module header doc for more info.